Illegitimi non carborundum

(Don't let the bastards grind you down.)

about me

Name:Grant

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

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Friday, January 19, 2007

Getting it wrong

Peeved as I so often am by Cathy Young's insistence on ever-so-scrupulously splitting the difference between the mostly right and the egregiously wrong, I welcomed the letter in today's Boston Globe from Mark A. R. Kleiman, a UCLA professor from whose blog she quoted in a recent article on global warming.

. . . Young suggests that overenthusiastic advocates [of taking global warming seriously—ed.] are just as far from the truth as people who, for reasons of interest or ideology, deny that human action is changing the climate in dangerous ways and that something must be done. That carries evenhandedness to an extreme. Broadly speaking, the environmental movement got global warming right, and the anti-environmental coalition of polluters and extreme "free-market" opponents of regulation got it wrong.

So while I'm flattered to be quoted, I must decline Ms. Young's efforts to enlist me as an ally in making her point. The anti-environmentalists insisted on a nonsensical position, and their credibility deserves to suffer for it. . .

Bravo.

Not that anyone's credibility ever seems to suffer these days from things they got grossly wrong (see, for example, the strange case of Bill Kristol), but bravo.